Feynan known as the biblical Punon is an extensive area named after the main Wadi that flows through it. The Wadi lies in the north of the Arava about 10 km south of the Dead Sea and is characterized by natural copper deposits that have been used since ancient times for mining and near them are the remains of many copper furnaces.
Khirbat en-Nahasneh
Like the Timna Valley in the south of the Arava, the renewed studies in Feinan claim that the Iron Age sites in the area refer to the earliest stages of the biblical kingdom of Edom. The renewed research even claims that Pharaoh Shushank I (the biblical Shishak), who conducted a campaign of conquest in the Levant in the 10th century BC, encouraged the copper trade instead of destroying the industry. Wadi Paynan contains many types of sites including copper mines, production sites, fortresses and other architectural remains. The key sites in the area are the Feinen ruin excavated by the Mines Museum in Bochum, Germany and the Al-Nahs ruin excavated in the early 2000s by Thom Levy of the University of San Diego. Like the Timna Valley in the south of the Arava, the Pinan copper deposit also experienced inactivity from the end of the Middle Bronze Age (beginning of the 2nd millennium BC) until the end of the Late Bronze Age (around 1500-1200 BC). The revival of copper production in the southern Levant, at the end of the 2nd millennium or at the beginning of the 1st millennium BC, refers to the widespread collapse of civilization at the end of the Late Bronze Age, when new economic opportunities became available especially for societies that lived on the periphery, far from the cores of powerful empires such as the New Kingdom of Egypt in the Levant. The excavations at the copper production sites of Kirvat Al-Nahs and Kha Al-Jariah in the southern. Jordan (Biblical Red) provide the first detailed documentation concerning the chronology, scale and social control of copper production in the early Iron Age when copper was still the most common metal in the East the Mediterranean Sea. This site addresses questions concerning the relationship between social and technological change and controversies concerning archeology and history from a period that can also be called the biblical period. In the Pintan region, these questions are specifically related to the emergence of the Kingdom of Edom and Israel, as both had a potential interest in the region’s rare natural resources..